Databases

Databases are like fancy spreadsheets where information lives.

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When you save your blog post it goes into a database, same goes for your bank account balance. A database can have anywhere from hundreds to billions of entries in it!

Because a database isn’t actually a spreadsheet, though, you need a programming language to get data in and out. A popular one is a language called SQL. You might have heard of MySQL – it’s one of the many databases that use SQL.

SQL stands for “Structured Query Language,” which sounds complicated but is pretty easy! Let’s say you wanted to get the name of every user over the age of 25. You might be able to do something like this:

SELECT name FROM users WHERE age > 25;

Doesn’t seem so hard, does it? You’re going to be writing SQL queries in no time!

Cocktail Party Fact

Database developer talk these days is dominated by the ‘NoSQL’ crowd. They don’t really like how SQL works, and are making new kinds of databases instead. Kind of a standoffish name, no?